Interview – Airborne Toxic Event’s Anna Bulbrook
Anna Bulbrook with Airborne Toxic Event.
L.A. band’s violinist comes out from the shadows
By now, the story behind Airborne Toxic Event has been repeated ad nauseum: the family and personal illnesses, and relationship bust-up, that drove lead singer Mikel Jollett from writing fiction to songs, the band name taken from a chapter heading in Don Delillo‘s White Noise, the buzz that’s grown up around the L.A.-based quintet for its dark-night-of-the-soul song “Sometime Around Midnight”, the notorious 1.6 Pitchfork review that prompted a serious-minded reply from Jollett.
But if the story has lost its novelty, the group’s debut album still packs a punch – though that’s nothing compared to the group’s live show, which aims for the all-in emotive territory of a Bruce Springsteen or U2, and succeeds more often than not.
This is in no small part due to Anna Bulbrook, the band’s classically-trained-viola-player-turned-rocker. I chatted with Anna from a Seattle tour stop a couple of days before the band’s Feb 18 Vancouver show, which was moved from the comparatively tiny Media Club to Richard’s on Richards due, as they say, to popular demand…
(Read my interview with Airborne Toxic Event’s Anna Bulbrook)
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